Me

I'm a daughter, sister, wife, and mother, in that order. My parents had four children. My brother Scott was their first, then 12 months and 12 days later I followed. Two and a half years later, we had a sister, Lynn, who was in turn followed seven years later by another sister, Leila, who completed the pack.
We grew up in Wisconsin in a small city on the shores of Lake Michigan. I attended college in Minneapolis and received my BA in Fine Art from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
More importantly, at the college is where I met Kurt,a Minnesotan from a small farming community, who would come to be my partner in life. We have been, and are still married for many years.
Together we've made it to our middle ages and have happily created four wonders of nature of our own, two boys and two girls, Adam, Buck, Anne Marie and Katherine. They are the light in my life. We live in Minnesota not far from where my husband and I met.

Daily Calendar

Day 75 : I'm afraid it's not looking good for our Olympic hopeful. Last seen meandering about the trees and muttering to herself something about not letting this thing getting the better of her and, I'll show them all and, it ain't over 'til it's over or something to that effect, our delusional knitter seeking to find her way clear through the murky grey of the forest path stole has stepped unwittingly into the unknittingly bog.In a misguided attempt to shave some time off her knitting time the knitter made the fateful decision to leave the unused stitches of the entrelac panels on a double point needle and risked dropping stitches off the ends of the needles instead of properly transferring the stitches to a proper stitch holder and thusly fell into a trap of her very own making. The knitter entangled herself in a grey web of extra fine merino wool, unmade from her own self conceit.

"So what if a stitch does slip off the end of one of the needles. It's not that terrible, you've dropped stitches before. It shouldn't be that hard to pick it up again, right?"

Right.Well, uhm, wrong, wrong, wrong, oh, SO WRONG.

The Ripple Effect:

Apparently when it comes to this shawl, and this knitter, dropping a stitch from the needle proved to be no little problem. Did you know that dropping a stitch from the holder has the same effect on the knitted object as that the dropping of a pebble has on a still pond? Ripples of unknitting began to spread out from that one single dropped stitch; wave upon wave the stitches began unraveling its way through the center of the shawl.This was no laughing matter, especially at 3:00 a.m. when the knitter caught in the throws of her own special demented madness, desperately struggled to stem the tide of unknitting that was spreading like a cancer through the shawl, eating away the hours and hours of earnest knitting effort. In a moment of despair the knitter began to believe that there was no hope and that she had no choice but to rip it back two whole tiers, which nearly brought her to hysterical tears.Oh, you would too if it was nearly dawn and you were covered in fine gray mist of tangled yarn from obsessively compulsively ripping apart your knitting, and wishing to high heaven that with every stitch that came undone that you could make yourself stop but knew you couldn't.

Good thing this isn't a race. I mean, boy, this could really have a negative effect on the outcome. Seriously, how embarrassing would it be to be the last to cross the finish line? I'd hate to be that loser.... Why are you laughing? You shouldn't be laughing. Oh, just go away and leave me alone.

The Center Holds:

In the end only four of the sections of entrelac were lost as she struggled to bring the de construction to a halt and find some semblance of sanity a reasonable point of return. This may not seem like that many panels but when each panel takes about an hour to knit it was lost time a plenty.Reconstruction has begun, but it's slow going and as you can well imagine the knitter is presently grieving the loss of progress on her stole and is currently working her way through the differing stages of grief: denial, anger, sadness and acceptance. Presently the anger has faded and has been replaced with sadness. (which three days of rain has done little to improve)

Presently the Grey Lady rests at the bottom of my knitting pile waiting to be resurrected. She will be... one day, just not today and probably not tomorrow, but one day.

Let me start by explaining to those of you who do not make the knit blog circuit that April 1st was flash your stash day and in a show of solidarity with my fellow yarn hoarders, I too bared it all. Laid out on my bed, right there in front of God and everybody, displayed on the quilt made by dear mother's own hands, I exposed the naked truth of my, here-to-fore never been seen in it's complete entirety, private yarn collection in all it's magnificence and glory.Was that wrong?

In truth this was a rather daunting task for me to undertake. I'm with my friend and fellow flasher, Amy when it comes to privacy. Exposing ones personal yarn collection just isn't something a proper yarn hoarder would naturally be inclined to do. It's just better to my equilibrium to not actually know the full extent of my addiction collection. It strips you of your ability to deny that you have enough yarn already. When I explained to Ani that my intent was to take a picture of my stash and post it, she stopped, did a double take and said "Wait, did you say ALL of it?"

I know it looks rather expansive but in truth it isn't as grand as it seems. It's just an illusion done with smoke and mirrors and possibly a little trick photography. I've been asked where I keep all that yarn when it's not being put on public display. I have 1,2,3,4,5,6 plastic tubs that I have tucked away in three or four separate corners of the house and I also have two, 3 drawer storage bins for the odd balls and single skeins and etc. and an end table drawer. (oh,Oh, I didn't take a picture of that, so, maybe a not-so-complete display) I also keep a couple of baskets and bags left out here and there in plain view, to keep me company and to entertain me when I'm bored with housework and such. I'm not trying to fool anyone, I freely admit that I'm a yarn addict, but I have it under control, I can stop any time I want, really.Before moving on to April and before discussing Project Spectrum colors, which are ( as you may have already guessed) yellow and orange. I have a few loose ends from March to tie up. For the March Project spectrum I started knitting a pink doily from crochet cotton on size 0 needles. I got to about this far, before it all started to go wrong. Well, not wrong per se, but this is where I decided to venture from the pattern as written because, well the pattern was going in a direction that seemed wrong to me. So I added the next two heart patterns to the next tier, only now I'm having trouble working out the final pattern set. I tried one way and decided that I wasn't happy with it, so I ripped it out and tried another way, after which I decided I was on a better track the first time. So I ripped it back and re-did it a third time. I've now concluded that neither way is what I'm after and I've now come up with a third way to knit it, which I'm hoping will do the trick; third times a charm, right? (this will actually be the fourth time I will be knitting these rows, but whose counting.) So as you can imagine the bloom is off the rose on this project, none the less I persist, just not with as much enthusiasm as when I started.

Other things that happened in March worth mentioning:The spring equinox on March 20th on which I planted flower seeds, March 20th also coincidentally happened to be my MIL's birthday, Happy Birthday Mary Jo.My son Buckman celebrated his 19th birthday two days later.Buck chose for his birthday cake a red velvet cake which I took a picture of for the spectrum project. If you take a close up picture it looks a bit like a picture of the planet Mars, cool!Before winter gave up the ghost to spring, my youngest received her wish and we were treated to a snow storm that dumped over a foot of snow on us. Most everyone else got a snow day out of it, my kids were not so fortunate, only a two hour delay to the start of school. Oh well, the snow was still there when they got home to play in. Click on the snow angel to see more pictures of the fun in the snow.

We went to see the last play to be be performed at the Guthrie Theatre before their move to the new location. We had front row seats left of the stage and enjoyed the performance very much. The young man, Santino Fontana, who played Hamlet, gave a marvelous performance. There's no where for this guy to go but up. I've seen a few plays at the Guthrie and have fond memories of it but I'm not a very sentimental type person and I don't think I will miss the old theater all that much. Still, it is a bit sad to see it go.

And finally a sad ending to the month for we had to put our beloved cat Sara to sleep due to declining health issues. Sara was with us for nearly twenty years. A little sweetie of a cat who purred clear up to the end. This was hard for us, we've had Sara longer than most of our children. For her to live as long as she did always will amaze us. Rest in peace Sara, we loved you well.